Topic: Can a survival game have no home base?

[Zerahan]

How to encourage always being on the move?

[Zerahan]

From Project Zomboid: Ironically, gaining a car makes the on-the-go style harder because you always have to return to the car to move on to the next POI. And this is partly because getting a usable car is a significant investment. You need a non-wrecked car that has the keys and you need a gas can that you probably have to cart over to the gas station to get gas to fill up the car to drive the car to the gas station to fill up the gas tank all the way. The ability to hotwire only removes the "has keys" requirement. Could change the world settings to make most cars have gas though, that would remove the gas station part. And if you could fill up other containers with gas, that would bypass the gas can requirement. These changes would make having a car less of an investment. But the car still stores a bunch of stuff, so you'd still have to go back to it....

[Zerahan]

Raft bypasses this issue by having your home base move. The world spawns new content in front of your raft (or near enough to navigate to the POI with the right upgrades). Oddly, this kills the exploration aspect of most survival games. The first time you come across the location, it is completely unknown and ready to be looted. The second time, it's completely known and you have a good idea of where the good loot is. And for me, the looting part is far less interesting than the novelty of an unknown location. So maybe context should change? The first time it's a place to be explored and looted. The second time is more about figuring out the best way to quickly navigate it.

Off topic, related to Inventory Management: That issue happens in 7 Days to Die as well. Once I know where the hidden stashes and weapons lockers are for any POI, I don't bother with traversing it as the dungeon it was designed to be. Instead, I break the window that hides the vault. Or build a ladder that goes right up to it. All the other cabinets and boxes are worthless by comparison. For example, the gigantic dungeon that is the Shotgun Messiah Factory can be mostly ignored. Just build a ladder to get up to the roof, specifically to the top of the tallest smokestack for the vast majority of the value contained in the dungeon. Then sell that loot for what you actually need. 7 Days is a case where sure, the loot is random, but there is always a "vault" that can be traded for what you actually need. Aka, if you need something, you know exactly where you need to go to get the money needed to buy it.

[Zerahan]

This is probably the most fun way to play Project Zomboid. Like, the moment I set up a base, the world turns into a checklist of buildings that I haven't moved everything out of yet. It instantly switches from a fun survival game into a tedious hording game. That change is both my fault and the game's fault - the best way to survive is to hunker down on top of literally everything that can be looted from the entire map. Weapons and cars are ironically the worst offenders to triggering this playstyle: Weapons can only be repaired so many times with non-renewable resources before they need complete replacement. And cars require non-renewable resources to repair. The only way to "renew" them is to go looting, and you can't know if a building will have the resources you need until you search it. And you can't mark off the building as "searched" unless you have moved everything from it to your base.

[Zerahan]

Is encouraging always staying on the move necessary? Or am I thinking about it as a solution to hording? Like, survivals games are always at their most fun when I'm constantly on the move. But this might just be a side effect of inventory limits. Fallout 4 stops being fun if I spend all my time hauling crap back to a settlement. Setting my carry weight to 4k just shifts the problem. Salvage beacons patched it by automating the hauling back of items to settlements (and then trade routes gave all settlements access to the items hauled back to any of them).

But at the same time, it feels like safehouses are a necessary component to a good survival game. Much like how good horror games need periods of relaxation between the periods of tension. Right now, the phases of a survival game are: 1) tense exploration out and about, and 2) safe but tedious inventory management inside the safe house. Perhaps the in-safe-house dynamic needs a tweak/overhaul instead of an outright removal.

It's also possible I'm just asking the wrong question here.

[Zerahan]

Something to mention: part of the fun is designing, building, and defending a base from invasion. This could be replaced by, for example, having your customizable car as your home base in a mad-max style wasteland survival game.